I am a Cat
by Cal reflector
Summary: Arthur the cat presents his observations on his humans and their folly; inspired by the classic Japanese satire, "Wagahai wa Neko de aru."


I am a cat. My humans named me Arthur after one of their legendary kings. I do not remember where I was born, only that I was a stray from birth, and one of a litter of seven.

I remember the day I met the first of my humans. This human, I learned afterwards, was a member of the most menacing human species; a_ pink-haired princess_, a creature with an uncanny ability to endanger her companions under the innocent guise of clumsiness and obstinacy. I hear that, on occasion, this species cam assume the form of a songstress, ninja, alien, magical girl, and other abominations of nature. Fortunately for me the one I came across was a benign mutant… or so I believed, for I was a mere kitten at the time and innocent to the world.

For a while after we met this human—a female, judging by her scent and the protrusions from her body—knelt before me and made curious noises. Only a minute later did I divine that she was attempting to speak to me in cat tongue. It was all gibberish of course, nonsense about hairy pineapples and rollerblade robots. Evidently, however, fake cat tongue is not entirely unintelligible to the human ear when spoken amongst members of that species. I witnessed this first hand later on when the barbaric humans—reacting all out of proportion to my small act of mischief—tried to capture and eat me.

During the pursuit, a girl described my appearance through the school PA system to hasten my apprehension. When she attempted to imitate my voice, the male humans around me collapsed as one, uttering ghastly death-knells as blood spewed from the two holes located beneath their eyes. I have since tried to invoke this spell of magical mass destruction in my war to save the world from the Human Peril, but no matter how many times I repeat the enigmatic incantation—_"I am Nunnally Lamperouge, the sword that smites evil!"—_nothing comes about. To add insult to injury, the humans respond to my attempts at smiting them by fondling and feeding me. Unable to resist these bribes and their superior size and strength, I resigned from my crusade for a better world to a life of shameful, if comfortable, captivity.

Living as I do with the humans, the more I observe them, the more I am forced to conclude that they are strange, silly creatures. Take the one named Rivalz: In the small group of humans in which I dwell, Rivalz is the omega-male and subordinate to all others. He constantly voices his envy of his friend Lelouch's alpha status and bemoans his own sorry state—namely, that no females are interested in him. His behavior is absurd, however, because unlike other alphas in the world, Lelouch possesses zero physical prowess. Any intelligent life form in Rivalz's position would immediately challenge and oust this feeble alpha, but he does not, implying that he is either an unintelligent life form that merely has the appearance of advanced evolution or suffers from some other unknown glitch.

While the aforementioned behavior may be attributed to genes from plain parents, a large part of Rivalz's misery is entirely his own doing. Despite being the omega male, he pines for the alpha female of the group, who happens also to be the alpha over the larger community of over one thousand young humans. Needless to say, the record of omega males courting alpha females, compiled through millennia of natural selection, is abysmal, and he does not seem likely to buck the trend.

All is not lost for poor Rivalz though, for there is a member of the community with whom his chances of successful courtship are at least reasonable, the girl named Nina, whom I shall discuss on a later occasion.

One might be tempted to ask, "Surely this Rivalz is not representative of his species. If he is, how could Homo Sapiens have flourished and ruled for so long?" That is a mystery for posterity to solve, but from my observation Rivalz is hardly an anomaly. Consider Lelouch, the strangest specimen of them all.

On many nights I have observed him laughing to himself in his room and scribbling notes, notes like "Six ha-s for third stanza; more inflection; short breath between second and third group of ha-s."

He also records himself during these rehearsals, editing the ones he likes and organizing them into playlists with track titles such as _Victory at Hand, All According to Plan, _and_ Look, People are just like Garbage!_ When confronted over the recordings by the green-haired humanoid parasite whom he is unable to rid himself of, he explains that they are backups for days when he's feeling under the weather, so he can produce the perfect laugh for any occasion with the press of a button. But when I see him listening to them through noise-cancelling earphones with such expression of unadulterated pleasure I wonder if he is merely enamored with the sound of his own laugh. I wonder also if such diligent preparation is a sign of genius or utter imbecile. For now I lean towards the latter.

I mentioned that Lelouch enjoys alpha male status; four out of five girls inside the student council and many more outside display unequivocal preference for him. This overwhelming reproductive advantage however is negated by his inability to notice any and all signals of acceptance and readiness from the opposite gender, which I attribute to a genetic birth defect. Nothing else could explain how someone endowed with so much sexual capital and whose father has enjoyed such astounding reproductive success could fail to pass on his DNA—which, after all, is the overriding imperative for all life since time immemorial. This is why I view Lelouch as an imbecile, a hindrance to his species, and a failure of a human being, a conclusion oft corroborated by my other humans when he is out of earshot.

Curiously, they arrive at the same conclusion through a different thought process, one that involves his attachment to his sister, the formidable creature whose previously mentioned incantation in fake cat tongue was to the male population of the Ashford community what the asteroids were to the dinosaurs, but she too is a story for another day.


End file.
